The Demon-Lover

“The Hour of the Wolf,” a film that is probably the darkest of Ingmar Bergman’s journeys into his shadowy interior, the protagonist, an artist beset by night sweats, is fishing off a craggy promontory on an island where he has come to live. A pesky young boy materializes and by degrees invades the artist’s tranquillity. They grapple; the boy scrambles onto the artist’s back, tearing at his neck and trying to devour him. The artist smashes the boy against the cliff, then beats his head in with a rock, and finally, with a curious gentleness, lowers the vanquished demon of childhood into the sea. The scene, in its choreographed ferocity, is an allegory for Bergman’s lifelong struggle to fend off the ghosts of his past, which he is determined to defeat, but with reverence.

The flat, windswept island in “The Hour of the Wolf” (1968) recalls Fårö, in the Baltic Sea, where Bergman, now eighty, spends most of his time. His single-story gray-brown house, which he built in 1966 for himself and Liv Ullmann, who was then his partner, sits unobtrusively on the island’s isolated southeastern edge, hidden by a forest of scrub pines and overlooking shale beaches and the empty sea. The island—a two-hour hop by plane and ferry from Stockholm, where Bergman now ventures only in order to work—also provides the brooding setting for “The Passion of Anna” (1969), and its extremes match Bergman’s roiling temperament. “I have such difficulty calming down—my stomach, my head, reality, everything. That is the reason I live in Fårö,” he said this March, in Stockholm. “I have a feeling of complete balance. The sea, the house, the loneliness, the light. Everything is clearer. Much more precise. I have the feeling that I am living on a limit, and I’m crossing that limit sometimes.” We were sitting in his small, soundproofed office at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, known as the Dramaten, where he was re-rehearsing Per Olov Enquist’s “The Image Makers” for its American début. The play, which will appear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music next week, is a fictional account of the first screening of Victor Sjöström’s silent film “The Phantom Carriage,” for the Nobel Prize-winning Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf; her book about her alcoholic but idealized father was the basis for Sjöström’s screenplay.

Bergman, who watches “The Phantom Carriage” once a year on Fårö, and who cast Sjöström memorably as the aging professor in “Wild Strawberries” (1957), also revisits his family in his work, but his method is the opposite of Lagerlöf’s idealization. His films, which amount to a singular courageous act of emotional autobiography, explore ancient humiliations; his gift lies in his access to dark feelings and in his ability to call them out into the open, where they can be seen and acknowledged and finally understood. And though most of the Western world knows Bergman only as a filmmaker, his work in the theatre—from Shakespeare to Mishima—is of similar stature. With Enquist’s play about Sjöström and Lagerlöf he dramatizes the struggle of all artists to impose their particular spirit on their material: in the act of reimagining their lives they somehow preserve and redeem both the inadequate parent and the memory of pain. This aesthetic transformation—the play calls it “resurrection”—is a game in which Bergman is without peer. While most people spend a lifetime building up defenses against the hurts of childhood, Bergman’s defense is to embrace them. “I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot,” he writes in his 1990 book, “Images: My Life in Film.” “And they have been forced to make themselves useful. At the same time they have still managed to keep on tormenting and embarrassing me in my private life.”

When Bergman and I had last met, in 1996, during the opening in Stockholm of “The Bacchae,” Bergman compared his theatre work to carpentry, and said he was eager to lay down his tools. He thought the play would be his farewell to the theatre. (He had bid adieu to filmmaking more than ten years earlier, after his Academy Award-winning “Fanny and Alexander.”) He was looking forward to Fårö’s solitude. He does not like noise—“Quiet” signs are posted around the Dramaten when he’s at work. He does not like lateness: he positions himself outside the rehearsal hall at ten each morning in case the cast wants to fraternize, and rehearsals begin promptly at ten-thirty; lunch is at twelve-forty-five; work finishes at three-thirty. He does not like meeting new people or people in large groups. He does not like surprises of any kind. “When I’m in Stockholm, I’m longing every day for that island—for the sea, for nature,” he told me. “To listen to music. To write. To write without deadlines. When he was my age, my father—he was a clergyman—relearned Hebrew with a friend. They read Hebrew and wrote to each other in Hebrew. There are so many books I want to read. Difficult books. That’s what I intend to do and what I’m longing for.”

Bergman’s retirement didn’t last. “If I don’t create, I don’t exist,” he told the Swedish press in 1976, when charges of tax fraud (from which he was completely exonerated in 1979) sent him into voluntary exile in Germany, where he stayed for several years. Since he was young, Bergman says, he has “created reality around me the way I wanted.” He began as a boy, with puppets and magic-lantern shows, and has since contrived to be in rehearsal almost all his life. “Through my playing, I want to master my anxiety, relieve tension, and triumph over my deterioration,” he writes in “Images.” “I want to depict, finally, the joy that I carry within me in spite of everything, and which I so seldom and so feebly have given attention to in my work.”

Indeed, when we think of Bergman’s films, joy is not the first word that comes to mind: for most viewers, they call up an atmosphere of agitation, a tense balance between scrutiny and unknowing, a sense of the silence that rustles underneath personality. Yet through this mist of unhappiness another kind of joy is discernible—in the audacity of Bergman’s camera, in the vigor of his argument against evasions of all kinds, and in the ruthless (and sometimes humorous) penetration into the contradictory drives of human nature. Before Bergman, film was mostly about what could be seen and depicted in the external world. Very little of important cinema was psychological: it was wars, chases, situation comedy. Bergman was the first filmmaker to build a whole oeuvre through the exploration of the internal world—to make visible the invisible drama of the self. For future generations of filmmakers, he was a kind of bushwhacker, who found a way of embracing the Freudian legacy in cinematic terms and cut a path deep into the psyche—“the soul’s battlefield,” as Woody Allen calls Bergman’s cinematic terrain.

In a career of nearly sixty years, Bergman has written some sixty films, most of which he directed; by the end of this year, he will have added another, “Faithless”—an account of his involvement in a love triangle, which Liv Ullmann is to direct. He has also mounted more than seventy plays; next February he will stage a new production of August Strindberg’s “Ghost Sonata” at the Dramaten. When Bergman is in Stockholm, he lives in an apartment built on the spot where Strindberg lived, and the connection is more than spiritual: as Sweden’s most expert storyteller, Bergman is Strindberg’s heir. And anyone wishing to map the geography of Bergman’s genius will find clues in the streets of Stockholm, where he grew up.

The Hedveg Eleanora Church is a high-domed ochre building on the fashionable east side of the city, where Bergman’s father, Erik, served as minister for two decades, beginning in the mid-thirties, when Bergman was a teen-ager. The church stands just two blocks north of the Dramaten, where Bergman would eventually set up a kind of alternative ministry—first as the artistic director, for a few years in the mid-sixties, and later as a staff director and resident genius. It’s startling that the church of Bergman’s youth and the theatre of his adulthood should be so close together: a metaphor for the twinned inconsolability and solace with which his rebellious work always contends. Hedveg Eleanora is austere, monumental, and calm in the watery northern daylight; the Dramaten is an Art Nouveau promise of sumptuous pleasure: warm, noisy, bustling, bright.

But it was in Hedveg Eleanora that Bergman got his first extended lesson in masquerade. In the canopied gilt Baroque pulpit, which is thirty feet high and looms above the teal pews, Pastor Bergman, who was tall and handsome, cut an imposing figure; the young Bergman “never dared go to sleep when my father was preaching.” “It was some sort of theatre,” he recalls. “Fascinating and boring. The room had a magic, you know. It was always sold out. My father was a marvellous actor.” Erik’s performance of a righteous, receptive minister in public was entirely at odds with what the young Bergman saw at home—a “lamentable terrified wretch” full of “compressed hatred.” The contradiction was the basis of Bergman’s confounding sense of insecurity. “Offstage he was nervous, irritable, and depressive,” Bergman writes of his father in his autobiography, “The Magic Lantern.” “He worried about being inadequate, he agonized over his public appearances, kept writing and rewriting his sermons.” Bergman adds, “He was always fretting and given to violent outbursts.”

In the limestone solemnity of the church, Bergman senior spoke of good and evil and the promise of eternal life; his son was fascinated by something else. “Death was always present, because under the floor in the church there were graves,” Bergman says. “I thought of the skeletons and the dead. Always in contact with the dead.” It was not just the actual dead but the emotionally dead parts of his parents which Bergman was obsessed with. “You can’t escape me,” the ghost of the humorless, punitive Bishop says to his stepson Alexander, tripping the boy on his face at the end of “Fanny and Alexander” (1982). And Bergman never could escape. At nineteen, he had a sensational falling-out with his father. “The mountain of aggressions between us was so heavy and so terrible, I had to go my own way,” he says. “I said to my father, ‘If you hit me, I’ll hit you.’ He did, and I did it. I can still remember his face.” The estrangement lasted some thirty years. “I look at him and think I ought to forget, but I don’t forget,” Bergman writes of his father in the autobiographical novel “Sunday’s Children.” “No, in fact, that’s not true. I wish I could forget him.” After Bergman’s mother, Karin, died, in 1966, Bergman, then forty-eight, began visiting his eighty-three-year-old father every Saturday at four o’clock. “It was good to sit there with him,” Bergman says. “We didn’t talk about complicated things or the past. I think it was some sort of therapy for us both. When he died, we were friends.”

Ingmar Bergman was interested not in saving souls but in baring them. Pastor Bergman invoked the Holy Spirit; his son made a spectacle of spirit and of his own version of the mysteries—what he called “the administration of the unspeakable.” In his films and stage productions, Bergman always leaves room for the unknown, the intuitive, the invisible; he may have lost his faith in God but not his sense of the miraculous. He likes to recall a time when he and his father went to church, and the pastor, who was sick that day, told his parishioners that there would be no Communion. Erik Bergman went back to the sacristy, reëmerged in vestments, and assisted the pastor by offering Communion. Bergman used the moment as the ending of “Winter Light” (1963); it also provided him with, as he writes, “the codification of a rule I have always followed and was to follow from then on: irrespective of everything, you will hold your communion.” The theatre’s communion is an altogether different kind; there are no sacraments, but in Bergman’s profound dissection of character and feeling there is a sense of the sacramental.

The Dramaten is probably the best repertory theatre in the world. It currently employs three hundred and six people, including fifty actors, and this year, for the cost of about three Broadway musicals ($25 million), it mounted thirty-two productions, eighteen of which were new shows. Bergman saw his first play there in 1928, when he was ten. From the outset, it was a stimulating holiday from the deadly silence, evasions, and disciplined repressions of his family. “For me, the stage was a free zone, where everything was allowed,” Bergman told me one afternoon as he took me to seat 675, in the second row of the upper circle, which is where he sat that first day, and where he still occasionally comes to sit and think about things after rehearsals or before an appointment. Dressed in his usual rehearsal mufti (a cardigan sweater, brown corduroy slacks, cashmere socks, white Reebok sneakers with a piece of black masking tape over the left toe), he eased his rangy, slightly stooped frame into the seat as stagehands loaded his production of Witold Gombrowicz’s “Princess Ivona” onto the main stage.

“Oh my God, I love this house,” he said, and immediately flashed back to his first visit. “I was alone. It was a matinée. A Sunday in March. My God, I’ll never forget it. I was so excited I got a fever. So I had the enormous advantage of being ill on Monday, when there was some sort of math test at school. My mother had been a hospital nurse. You could never bluff her. I had a real fever, so I could stay at home. I was in bed the whole day. Not talking to anybody. Lying under the covers. Thinking of what I’d seen the day before.”

Early in the the film version of “Sunday’s Children” (1992), Bergman’s towheaded proxy, Pu, sits with his playmates in the upstairs room of the blacksmith’s house, where the blacksmith’s bovine wife suckles a boy of five as well as her own infant. “Can I taste?” the dour Pu asks. The other children laugh. The woman says, “I don’t mind, Pu, but you’ll have to ask your grandmama or mum first.” The easy access to emotion, attentiveness, embrace—all the coherence and pleasure that the breast symbolizes for a child—was never certain for Bergman.

“I was quite sure I had been an unwanted child, growing up out of a cold womb,” Bergman writes. When Karin’s account of her more than fifty-year marriage was found in a safe after her death, it left her husband devastated and Bergman vindicated in his childhood hunch about his mother’s ambivalence toward him. Bergman ends his autobiography with an entry from his mother’s diary written shortly after his birth, in 1918. She’d been married five years.

Our son was born on Sunday morning on 14 July. He immediately contracted a high temperature and severe diarrhea. He looks like a tiny skeleton with a big fiery red nose. He stubbornly refuses to open his eyes. I had no milk after a few days because of my illness. Then he was baptized in an emergency here at the hospital. He is called Ernst Ingmar. Ma has taken him to Våroms, where she found a wet nurse. Ma is bitter about Erik’s inability to solve our practical problems. Erik resents Ma’s interference in our private life. I lie here helpless and miserable. Sometimes when I am alone, I cry. If the boy dies, Ma says she will look after Dag, and I am to take up my profession again. She wants Erik and me to separate as soon as possible. . . . I don’t think I have the right to leave Erik. . . . I pray to God with no confidence. One will probably have to manage alone as best one can.

Ingmar was sandwiched between his bullying older brother, Dag, whose bed he once tried to set on fire, and his sister Margareta. Besides the children, Karin was saddled with her agitated husband and a full parish workload: she didn’t have the emotional reserves to satisfy Ingmar’s hectoring neediness. “Her reactions to me were incomprehensible,” Bergman says. “She could be very warm and tender to me and very standoffish and cold.”

Ingmar was frequently punished. When he wet his bed, which he did chronically, he was forced to wear a red skirt for the entire day; minor infractions of family rules meant that the child was temporarily “frozen out,” meaning that “no one spoke or replied to you”; serious misdemeanors were met with thrashings, which were carried out with a carpetbeater in his father’s study. “When the punishment quota had been established, a hard green cushion was fetched, trousers and underpants taken down, you prostrated yourself over the cushion, someone held firmly onto your neck and the strokes were administered,” Bergman writes. “After the strokes had been administered, you had to kiss Father’s hand, at which forgiveness was declared and the burden of sin fell away, deliverance and grace ensued.”

Inevitably, in an environment ruled by caprice and control, Bergman became a showoff and a wily fabulist. “I was a talented liar,” Bergman says. In “Fanny and Alexander” he repeats the true story of telling his school class that his mother had sold him to the circus. For the young Bergman, the unmooring anxiety was that he couldn’t seem to hold his parents’ attention—a distance emphasized by the fact that he was never allowed to address them with the intimate du. The excruciating frustration of not quite being able to reach a parent is a powerful mood in many of his films. In “The Silence” (1963) a boy languishes outside a hotel room where his mother has gone to bed with a stranger; in “Fanny and Alexander” brother and sister are locked away from the warmth of their mother in a drab room of the Bishop’s house. These are chilling traces of Karin’s iciness, which burned and numbed him at the same time.

“Already as a little boy, I had to figure out how to get my mother warm,” Bergman recalls. “When I was five, I started to train myself to read my mother, her way of thinking and reacting. Then it went from my mother to the people surrounding me.” This childhood maneuver became his greatest directorial asset. “He’s a camera,” the grande dame of the Swedish theatre, Anita Björk, says. “He looks at you and sees everything.” Bergman’s uncanny, prolonged cinematic scrutiny of the face—“No one draws so close to it as Bergman does,” François Truffaut said—originates in a desire to get under Karin’s skin.

From an early age, Bergman re-created in himself a kind of alternative mother—giving himself, in his fantasy-obsessed play, his own form of undivided attention. Bergman’s puppets, toy theatres, and magic-lantern shows were worlds that he totally controlled and that were all-embracing reflections of him. In his films the consoling embrace is an iconic motif: in “Cries and Whispers” (1973), in which two sisters and a maid circle each other in a deathwatch over a third sister, the maid bares her breast and holds the dying Agnes to her; in “Sunday’s Children,” as Pu and his father find shelter from a rainstorm during a bicycle trip, the father wraps his jacket around his son’s shivering shoulders.

These images resonate with Bergman’s defining longing for what he calls “contact in the belly.” “I wanted to touch,” he says. “I had a very strong longing to touch other human beings. Still do.” Bergman’s hectic emotional life (he has had five wives, nine children, and mistresses in almost epic numbers) has been dominated by this ancient, unslakable emptiness and avidity. “He sought the mother,” Liv Ullmann, who had a daughter with Bergman, writes about their five-year relationship in her own memoir, “Changing.” “Arms that would open to him, warm and without complications.”

Only Bergman’s upper-class maternal grandmother, Anna Åkerblom, who had been a teacher, offered him unconditional acceptance. “To her I was not a child, I was a human being,” Bergman says, recalling summers at her house in the country. “Every evening we’d sit down together on the same green sofa, perhaps for half an hour. We’d sit holding hands and we’d discuss things. Or she’d read something to me.” Together, they went to the movies, they invented ghost stories, and, as he writes in “The Magic Lantern,” they created their own crude cinematic scenarios: “One of us started by drawing a picture, then the other continued with the next picture, and thus the action developed. We drew ‘actions’ for several days. They could amount to forty or fifty pictures, and in between the pictures we wrote explanatory texts.”

Bergman was the beneficiary of a focus that his grandmother had not been able to lavish on Karin, and that Karin, in turn, could not provide for her son. “Were we given masks instead of faces?” Bergman asks his mother in “The Magic Lantern.” He answers his own question in “Persona” (1966), whose title has its root in the Latin for “mask.” He separates the dead and the caring parts of his mother into two warring characters, who in the course of the drama merge, in a weird symbiosis, into one face. In the dreamlike prologue a bookish boy tries to touch the large fading image of a woman who looms and recedes at the same time; this turns out to be Alma (Bibi Andersson), who is a nurse, as Karin was—the bright, duty-bound, positive side of the mother. In the course of the film, Alma is infiltrated by the negativity of her patient, an actress called Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann), who rejects both speech and motherhood, and even goes as far as to rip up a picture of her son. “It’s amusing to study her,” Elisabeth writes in a letter about Alma, who has opened up to her over time, and who intercepts the letter. She feels betrayed, and her humiliation becomes an articulate, almost visionary energy, which she projects into the mute Elisabeth, conjuring her voice and speaking her story, which echoes the story of Karin and Ingmar:

The child was sick. It cried unceasingly, day and night, I hated it, I was afraid, I had a bad conscience. . . . The little body had an incredible, violent love for his mother. I protect myself, defend myself desperately, because I know I cannot repay it. . . . And so I try and try. But it leads only to clumsy, cruel encounters between me and the boy. I can’t, I can’t, I’m cold and indifferent, and he looks at me and loves me and is so soft I want to hit him, because he won’t leave me alone.

“Persona” puts the audience where the child in Bergman sits: full of contradictory feelings and images that are imminences of the betrayal of love and its even graver consequence, the loss of meaning. “The picture grows white, grey, the face is wiped out. Is transformed into Alma’s face, starts to move, assumes strange contours,” read the stage directions for the end of the film, which was originally called “Cinematography.” “The words become meaningless, running and jumping, finally vanishing altogether. The projector stops, the arc lamp is extinguished.”

From the moment when the ten-year-old Bergman cranked his first projector and ran his first three-metre film loop through a magic lantern—lit by a paraffin lamp and throwing a trembly brown image on the whitewashed wall of his nursery wardrobe—the shadows on the wall, he says, “wanted to tell me something.” He goes on, “It was a girl, a beautiful girl. She woke up. Stretched her arms out. Danced just one circle and went out. How I concentrated on this girl! Then I could move it the other way, so she came back!” The apparatus of film could retrieve or reverse the past; it could make the inert come to life; it could penetrate the senses and speak soul to soul with or without words. It was—and remains—a miraculous hedge against loss. Bergman says, “I still have the same feeling of fascination. It hasn’t changed.”

“Almost from the beginning, Ingmar knew exactly what he wanted,” says Bergman’s best friend, Erland Josephson, who starred in “Scenes from a Marriage” (1973), among many other Bergman projects. His performing partnership with the director dates from his student days, when the twenty-one-year-old Bergman cast him as Antonio in a university production of “The Merchant of Venice.” “He was very strict and honest with the text, and very practical,” Josephson says, adding, “He always knew that this is a profession for experienced people, and that he had to get experience as fast as possible.” The Swedish painter Ann Romyn, who knew Bergman in his early professional years and found his energy “menacing,” says, “He was a sort of sorcerer. He had powers, I would say. Imaginative powers. He could influence people.”

In 1941, at the age of twenty-three, Bergman undertook for the first time to write uninterruptedly. The result in that first year was twelve stage plays and a libretto. One of the plays, “Kasper’s Death,” got him a job in the script department of Svensk Filmindustri, and there, from nine to five every day, he joined a “half-dozen slaves” trying to make screenplays from novels, stories, and scripts in need of doctoring. Soon the company was producing one of Bergman’s original screenplays, “Torment” (1944)—an anguished Expressionist tale about a student who falls in love with a woman and finds out that he shares her with his sadistic, crypto-Nazi Latin instructor. The film’s director was Alf Sjöberg, a grandee of the Dramaten, whose reputation for excellence would be surpassed in his life-time only by Bergman’s own; he adopted the young author as a kind of protégé. When Sjöberg was otherwise engaged, Bergman even got to shoot the film’s final exteriors, which represent his first professional footage. “I was more excited than I can describe,” he wrote later. “The small film crew threatened to walk off the set and go home. I screamed and swore so loudly that people woke up and looked out their windows. It was four o’clock in the morning.”

Over the next few years, Bergman made “Crisis” (1946), “It Rains on Our Love” (1946), “Port of Call” (1948), “Music in Darkness” (1948), “Prison” (1949), and “Thirst” (1949), all of which telegraphed in their titles a rebellious pessimism that shocked the Swedes. Except for “Music in Darkness,” a story about a pianist blinded in military service, which was a box-office success, the films were generally not well received. “Bergman was treated like a subversive, blasphemous, and irritating schoolboy,” Truffaut wrote in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1958. Nevertheless, Bergman was gathering support from the Swedish film industry. The producer Carl Anders Dymling allowed him to start from scratch on “Crisis” after three weeks of disastrous dailies. Victor Sjöström, then the artistic director of Svensk Filmindustri, taught him “about the power of the naked face and to be simple, direct, and tell a story,” Bergman says. Sjöström also offered advice about the politics of persuasion both onscreen and off. “Don’t keep having rows with everyone,” he told Bergman. “They simply get angry and do a less good job. Don’t turn everything into primary issues. The audience just groans.” The film editor Oscar Rosander revealed “a fundamental truth—that editing occurs during filming itself, the rhythm created in the script.” Several of Bergman’s early scripts were co-authored, but increasingly he relied on his own narrative skills; he often writes his scripts in novel form before breaking them down into screenplays. “Ingmar had to do his own scripts simply because there were no novelists or playwrights who were any good in Sweden,” Michael Meyer, the British translator and biographer of Strindberg and Ibsen, says. “They didn’t have a Graham Greene.”

At the same time that Bergman was directing films, he headed up a series of civic theatre companies—first at the Helsingborg City Theatre, where his appointment as artistic director, at twenty-six, made him the youngest in the nation’s history. He continued this double duty throughout his career, and many of his early masterpieces (“Wild Strawberries,” “The Seventh Seal,” “Smiles of a Summer Night”) were engineered in part to keep his theatre company together and working. By the early fifties, he had assimilated his influences (Cocteau, Anouilh, Hitchcock, classical theatre), and his films took an introspective turn: they moved from posing social problems to analyzing personal ones. When Bergman tried to dramatize the happiness of Swedish youth—in “Summer Interlude” (1951), “Summer with Monika” (1953), and, even tangentially, in the masterly “Wild Strawberries”—the films were strained, and Bergman understood why. “I myself never felt young, only immature,” he wrote in “Images.” “As a child, I never associated with other young people. I isolated myself from my peers and became a loner. When I had to formulate dialogue for my young characters, I reached for literary clichés and adopted a coquettish silliness.”

Bergman was better at dramatizing his demons—what he calls the “heavy inheritance of universal terror” which permeated everything in his life. Liv Ullmann remembers a trip they took to Rome together, when he was “nervous of the plane and of everything.” They stopped off in Copenhagen, and he needed to wash his hands, which meant leaving her, “the safe person,” and taking the elevator down to the men’s room. “After about ten minutes, I saw him come out of the lift. He had a proud little smile. He had done it!” She adds, “I still think of that little smile, which seemed to say ‘Do you know what I’ve done all by myself?’ He’d mastered his fear—and his fears are so everyday.”

By his mid-thirties, Bergman had fresh anguish to add to his childhood material. His philandering was legendary: one revue song of the period went “I don’t mind being wild and free /As long as Ingmar Bergman fancies me.” Bibi Andersson, who took up with Bergman in the mid-fifties for a few years, says, “He was considered a rebel and a genius and brave and a little dangerous. He walked around with this beard and beret and boots. Too thin, too energetic, but wild. I thought he was the sexiest thing the world had created.” She adds, “When he asked me to be with him, I thought to myself, I don’t give a shit if I’m in love or not. I just want to be around this mind. I want to hear things. I want to learn things. My mother kicked me out.” Andersson, who remains a close friend of Bergman’s, sees him as “a very hysterical personality.”

But Bergman was beginning to make something of his hysteria—something that, unlike his artless childhood outbursts, forced thoughtfulness from his audience about his mortified inner life. It was with “Sawdust and Tinsel” (1953) that he took his initial step into murky autobiographical terrain, and his soul-searching and his cinematic language brilliantly coalesced for the first time. In the character of Albert Johansson—a circus owner caught between his longing for a settled existence with the wife he has abandoned and his vagabond life with a circus bareback rider—Bergman created “a walking chaos of conflicting emotions” who was a simulacrum of his own erotic confusions. He had found his cinematic vein.

“ ‘Sawdust and Tinsel’ was my first true picture,” Bergman says. “You know, my lying went on for a long time. Suddenly I understood that I had to stop. I saw that the lies were some sort of filth on my pictures. . . . I had the conscious feeling ‘Now, Ingmar, you must tell the truth every minute.’ Then, in 1955, before ‘Smiles of a Summer Night,’ I was together with a girl. We were very much in love. I had to tell her the truth, and I did. ‘I’m not going to marry you. I don’t love you that way. I want to fuck you.’ That was the beginning. Poor girl.” Bergman’s art now squarely acted out his anxiety, which he calls “my life’s most faithful companion, inherited from both my parents, placed in the very center of my identity—my demon and my friend spurring me on.” Erland Josephson says, “He is inconsolable, and he wants to be that—to be close to his own hurt parts.” Out of this brokenness, Bergman generated a plethora of unsettling images: the clock with no hands (“Wild Strawberries”), the spectral dance of death (“The Seventh Seal”), the cuckolded clown bearing his naked wife over a rocky shore (“Sawdust and Tinsel”), and always the mysterious, protean illuminations of the human face.

Bergman’s God-haunted stories gave an uncompromising form to the existentialist angst that was the intellectual vogue of nineteen-fifties Europe, sounding the rumble of loss under everything: love, sex, faith, identity. The films created a seismic disturbance when they were first shown, and nowhere more than in America, which embraced Bergman with an enthusiasm that Sweden never matched, perhaps in reaction to the insipidity of American entertainment in the postwar boom. Bergman was the antidote to the fluffy world of Doris Day, George Axelrod, and William Inge. “ ‘The Seventh Seal’ and ‘Wild Strawberries’ came to New York,” Woody Allen recalls. “I was stupefied. I was on the edge of my seat. They could’ve burned down the theatre, I wouldn’t have known.” Allen continues, “He’s a great entertainer. This is what finally makes him great. It’s not homework to go to his movies.”

Not homework, perhaps, but sometimes hard work: “The Rite” (1969), about a trio of players being investigated by a judge, is, to all intents and purposes, incomprehensible. Occasionally, Bergman’s stories collapse under the weight of their ambition to be at once in the avant-garde of cinema and of suffering. The suggestion of incest between sisters in “The Silence” seems arid; the schizophrenia in “Through a Glass Darkly” (1961) feels pat; the pessimism in “The Serpent’s Egg” (1977), Bergman’s study of twenties Berlin, verges on self-parody.

And Bergman, as the éminence grise of the art house, whose images are iconic and at times pretentious, is an easy target for parody. In “The Seventh Seal,” for instance, Death arrives, in all his medieval regalia (white face, hooded cloak, scythe), and plays chess with the Knight. Woody Allen adored the scene, and sent up the figure in both film (“Love and Death”) and fiction: in a piece called “Death Knocks,” the Grim Reaper reappears for a game of gin rummy with a schlepper. Bergman himself is not above laughing at the solemnity of his cinematic idiom. For example, in “The Magician” (1958), when the ghost of an actor returns to haunt the mute impresario of a travelling magic show, he says, “I’m a ghost already. Actually better as such. I have become convincing, which I never was as an actor.” Then there’s the subversive joy of Bergman’s Uncle Carl, his mother’s soft-headed inventor brother, who turns up as a character in “Fanny and Alexander” and astonishes the kids by blowing out candles with his farts.

Although his movies are complex, Bergman usually manages to make his ideas clear and exciting for an audience. His startling dramatic fillips reveal a story’s pulse—as, for instance, in “Cries and Whispers,” where Agnes dies twice, to allow Bergman to expose her sisters’ cold hearts. “If you find the rhythm, the heartbeat of the play, or if you can make it in the film, it is much easier for an audience to live with the story and accept it,” he says. “The wonderful thing about Ibsen or Strindberg or Shakespeare or Euripides is there is a drive, a rhythm. You feel, My God, I can listen to this. It’s a fantastic feeling. It’s breathing.”

The oxygen of Bergman’s own seductive intelligence is most apparent in his work with actors. He is very selective about whom he collaborates with, and careful about choosing roles that will exploit an actor’s particular qualities. “Without that actor, he’s not interested,” says the choreographer Donya Feuer, who has worked with Bergman since 1964. Bergman’s explosive intensity and his acute attentiveness put actors in a powerful creative force field. “It’s very much in the way he looks at you,” Feuer says. “There’s something so naked, so exposed, so vulnerable, so available to him all the time, no matter what he’s doing, and that availability, I think, is part of his talent. . . . He really listens. He’s not listening to what he wants to hear. He’s listening to what he’s hearing, and understanding it, not criticizing it.”

Bergman, who is deaf in his left ear but claims that with his right ear he can “hear like a three-year-old child,” explains, “If I listen to them, they not only listen to themselves, they also listen to each other. And, if I do speak, it’s important to say the precise word and not to start a discussion. That is the worst thing you can do as a director. Don’t discuss. Just say the right word at the right moment. If it’s planned, it will be unspontaneous and make the actors suspicious. That was a great difficulty when I worked in Germany for six years. I had to translate. My intuition told me the right thing in Swedish, but in the time it took to translate the word the moment had passed.”

When Bergman walks into a rehearsal, he is meticulously prepared. “I read and reread and reread the play,” he says. “The writing and the blocking take me four pages a day, every day except Sundays.” On the rehearsal floor, Bergman works very close to his actors. “He’s sitting on your shoulder all the time,” Elin Klinga, one of Bergman’s recent acting discoveries, says. He can be seen consistently right up under his actors’ chins in a television documentary about the making of “In the Presence of a Clown,” Bergman’s superb TV play, in which Uncle Carl leaves a sanitarium to take his newest brainstorm—a “living talking picture” about the last days of Schubert—on the road. At one point, Bergman smooths Erland Josephson’s furrowed brow. “Don’t wrinkle so much,” he says. In the theatre, Bergman doesn’t sit and watch from the auditorium until it’s time for technical rehearsals. According to his son Mats, an actor at the Dramaten (he was a memorably lubricious fop in Bergman’s version of “The Misanthrope”), when his father is displeased with what he’s watching “he looks at you but not very long, a very short glimpse, and then he looks at something else.” It’s easier to tell when he’s pleased. “He’s shouting, screaming, laughing ‘Good!’ Like a cheerleader.”

Sometimes, in the hubbub of blocking and in order to cut through conversation, Bergman will grab actors and walk them through a particular movement to show what he has in mind. “When he grabs your arm to lead you around, it’s very frustrating,” Bibi Andersson says. “You feel how he trembles. If you feel your arm resist in any way, he feels that. It’s like taking your pulse. He takes you literally by the wrist.” She continues, “I bridled at that until I realized that he doesn’t do it to be in charge of me—he does it to sense if I’m with him.”

“When I work, it’s not important what I’m saying, it’s the contact,” Bergman says, and he recalls that the talented, taciturn Ingrid Thulin once said, “Ingmar, when you talk to me I never understand what you say. But when you don’t talk to me I understand completely what you mean.” Bergman goes on, “A good actor is very physical. I can talk to his body, and I know before he knows if his body-mind accepts or doesn’t accept what I want. I feel it in my body.” He adds, “To force an actor to do something is silly. You can convince him, you can talk to him. Then we have the opening, and he makes what you want him to make. Then, five days after the opening, he starts to change a little of what I’ve said to him. Then suddenly there are ten actors who start to change a little of what the director has told them. There is no rhythm anymore. There is no performance anymore. . . . So it’s a good idea to have the actor feel good about the blocking, the thinking, the rhythm. Then we will make a common creation.”

Bergman has a special empathy for his actresses, from whom he’s been able to coax, in Truffaut’s words, “dormant genius”: Maj-Britt Nilsson, Harriet Andersson, Eva Dahlbeck, Gunnel Lindblom, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann. (To this film list should be added Bergman’s stage collaborations with Lena Endre, Marie Richardson, Pernilla August, and Elin Klinga.) Bibi Andersson compares him to Strindberg, who “needed women to feed him. When they couldn’t inspire him, it was over. That’s similar to Bergman. In his younger years, he had women. Now he has actresses. He still loves to create around an actress.” And the actresses all have to grapple with Bergman’s desire to decipher and to possess them. “He wants to be the only one for you,” Klinga says. “He told Anita Björk and me when we were working with another director, ‘I’m very jealous.’ And he was. We hugged him and said, ‘We’re yours.’ That’s like a twelve-year-old boy again.” As Bibi Andersson puts it, “He really wants to get under your skin.” She adds, “He also feels penetrated.” In this exchange of energy, there is a significant erotic charge. The reciprocated gaze—the thing that so bedevilled Bergman as a child—is what gives him his power as a director. “You feel absolutely recognized,” Ullmann says. “I have the feeling of finally being seen, and because I’m being seen I blush more. I come out with words in a way I never knew I would. I dare to laugh, which I always thought was very difficult. I dare to cry.”

For Bergman, rehearsals impose an exacting discipline, not only on the actors but on his own explosive emotions. It’s a situation in which, as Erland Josephson has written, Bergman is “overpoweringly self-assured in his efforts to overpower insecurity; full of empathy in order to keep his impatience under control; full of impatience in order to keep his empathy under control.” Bergman says, “If I’m in the rehearsal in my own private turmoil—either fury or love—then I can’t hear the actors, I can only hear myself. When I go into the rehearsal room or into the film studio, I must switch. I am the director.”

As much as possible, Bergman leaves nothing to chance. “Everything must be predictable and predicted,” Josephson says. “The only thing allowed to surprise Bergman and others is Bergman himself.” He hates “tumult, aggression, or emotional outbursts,” but he has been prone to all three. “No one could be as angry as Ingmar,” Ullmann writes in “Changing.” Once, on Fårö, she remembers questioning something he did. Bergman flew into a rage. “He ran after me. I knew I was going to die,” Ullmann says. “I went into the bathroom. I locked myself in. Then suddenly he kicked right through the door. His slippers landed on me. He started to laugh. I came out because he thought it was so comical. We made it up immediately.” She adds, “If you disagree, he feels he’s not loved. I think he feels that to be loved he must be loved unconditionally.” In his early days as a director, Bergman threw chairs as easily as tantrums; even now he still believes in the occasional well-planned “pedagogic outburst.”

“Sometimes when he’s at his most angry and controlling—he can be really tough to work with, because he wants everything his way—deep down you can be very moved,” Ullmann says. “He is protecting that one place where he feels safe: his creativity. The director. The writer. The master of it all.” When Bergman’s control is challenged, onstage or off, life can get complicated. In 1995, Bergman cancelled what was to be his farewell production in America, the New York engagement of his glorious version of “The Misanthrope.” The Stockholm production, which ranks among my top ten productions in a lifetime of theatregoing, was the best Molière I’ve ever seen—a court world turned into a den of gorgeous and predatory animals. It ran for a hundred performances, and caused an unholy row within the Dramaten and in the Swedish press. “He came, he saw, he cut them to bits,” declared the Expressen when Bergman came in from Fårö to see the production again before rehearsing it for the New York trip and found certain “deviations” from the interpretation he’d initially agreed on with the cast. “If I think I am being betrayed, I am quick to betray,” Bergman writes in “The Magic Lantern.” “If I feel cut off, I cut off.” Bergman felt he couldn’t trust even a re-rehearsed production to be performed without more surprises. So he withdrew his imprimatur and prevented his beautiful production from travelling. Lars Löfgren, then the head of the Dramaten, tried to reason with Bergman. “I said, ‘You’re a staff director. You’re supposed to be here to work,’ ” Löfgren recalls. “ ‘If the production is not good at the moment, it has been good, and it must be rehearsed, because we’re going to New York with it. I want you back with me.’ He said, ‘You don’t respect my artistic work.’ I said, ‘Of course I do. That’s why I want you back.’ He didn’t come.”

Though Bergman characterized the incident as “a sneeze in eternity,” it ended his long friendship with Löfgren. Bergman regards such shows of aggression as occasionally necessary, even if he feels repentant about them afterward. “I discovered early into our rehearsals that to be understanding and to offer a sympathetic ear did not work,” he writes of directing Ingrid Bergman in “Autumn Sonata.” The actress, in the role of a concert pianist who gave everything to her art and nothing to her children, had worked out her intonations and gestures before she arrived at the read-through; in the manner of an American film star, she also objected to some of Bergman’s lines. “When it was over and we were alone, Ingmar said, ‘I can’t go through with this,’ ” says Ullmann, who co-starred in the film, and who had rarely seen the director “really, really down.” “She’d stop every other sentence and say, ‘Is she going to say something like this? I can’t say something like this.’ ” Ullmann continues, “You know, none of us had ever criticized anything Ingmar wrote.” Ingrid Bergman bridled at the dialogue for a scene in which Ullmann, who plays the daughter, delivers a tearful, corrosive diatribe against her. “Help me!” are the words that the script called for the mother to come back with. As Ullmann recalls, “She said, ‘I’m not saying that. I want to slap her face.’ Ingmar got so shocked. They walked out of the studio, and we heard them shouting out in the corridor. Terrible. We looked at each other and thought, This is the end.” Finally, the actress spoke the words, but on the screen her eyes tell a different, indignant story. Out of the tension between her and Bergman she’d made something that even he was amazed by.

“We have to have direct contact with the childish,” Bergman says. “Actors who don’t have direct contact with their childhood are not good actors. They are boring intellectual actors.” But the very childishness that is the wellspring of Bergman’s genius is also the source of his occasional capricious cruelty. After Josephson went to Paris for a weekend while in rehearsal for a Bergman show, he and Bergman stopped talking for about a year. “Ingmar didn’t like it,” Josephson explains. “I didn’t miss any rehearsals, but he was angry because I took the risk. I was out of his control for a weekend. He started talking about my face, my chins. It was terribly aggressive. He has a talent for knowing where to put the knife.”

Humiliation may be Bergman’s theme, but it can also be his practice, as Sir Laurence Olivier discovered when Bergman directed a 1970 National Theatre production of Michael Meyer’s version of “Hedda Gabler,” with Maggie Smith. Olivier—whom Bergman always referred to in private as “Lord Olivier”—was then the National’s artistic director. Meyer recalls sitting with Olivier and watching Bergman work with the actors: “Suddenly Larry said, ‘Oh, Ingmar?’ So Ingmar, who hasn’t been interrupted, I think, in about forty years, turned around and said, ‘Yes, Larry.’ Larry said, ‘I’m only suggesting this and you may think this is absolute rubbish . . . ’ And then there was a ghastly hush at this really sort of very melodramatic suggestion. Ingmar said with a pause—no one knows the value of a pause better than Ingmar Bergman—‘Perhaps, we’ll see,’ and went on directing.” Meyer continues, “In the afternoon, Larry made some equally fatuous suggestions. This time, Ingmar didn’t even turn around. He just paused for I should think a full minute with his back to Larry and then said, ‘Yes,’ and went on directing.” The next day, Olivier was absent from rehearsals. Some weeks later, after a ponderous dress rehearsal, Bergman asked everyone up to Maggie Smith’s dressing room “to thank us all personally.” Meyer continues, “We all trooped up there. And when Larry naturally enough came up, Ingmar publicly and very rudely excluded him from the meeting. This was the unforgivable thing, to humiliate him in that way.”

When Bergman left Sweden in 1976 to live in Germany, he wrote a long letter to his countrymen, published in the Expressen, which concluded on a supercilious note: “I quote Strindberg, when he went mad, ‘Watch out, you bastards, I’ll see you in my next play.’ ” But the Bergman who returned to Sweden in the early eighties was not the same man. “It was like night and day. There was an enormous humility,” Donya Feuer says. “I think he suddenly felt he had nothing to protect. He was open to what was going on with other people. He was more considerate of everyone.” Part of this transformation was the influence of his fourth wife, Ingrid von Rosen, whom he married in 1971 and with whom he lived happily until her death, from cancer, in 1995. “I had contact with reality through Ingrid,” Bergman says. Feuer explains, “She managed everything—telephone calls, letters. She was the only one who could read his handwriting and type out the scripts. . . . She was very upper class, very well educated, and very refined. She never competed with his professional work. She was responsible for bringing all the children together.”

For Bergman’s sixtieth birthday, in 1978, all nine of his children gathered at Fårö for the first time. From that moment, Bergman, who is referred to jokingly within the family as the Big Gorilla, became an unlikely but beloved patriarch. “He was nonexistent as a father—except now, when the children are grown,” Liv Ullmann says. “They idolize him. I think he’s been very lucky with the mothers, because I, at least, have never bad-mouthed him. I must say there were years when Linn didn’t see him.” When Linn, their daughter, was about seven and was keeping her mother company in the dressing room, Ullmann remembers Bergman’s encountering her for the first time in four years. “ ‘Oh, Linn,’ he said, and swung her around in his arms for half a minute. Then he said, ‘You know, Linn, Daddy has work, too. He has other things to do.’ And then he left the room. That was it.”

Bergman now has more contact with his children, some of whom are in the arts. Linn is a novelist; Eva runs the Backa Theatre, in Göteborg; Daniel directed “Sunday’s Children.” But, even though Bergman has renovated a few buildings on his Fårö property as a summer enclave for his children, it’s not easy to get near him. “They have dinner once, maybe, if at all,” Ullmann says. “Then they fight to sit at his side. Sometimes he comes by for coffee. They never know when, and it’s an honor. Then he has his cinema. He invites some to the cinema in the afternoon, others in the evening.”

When Ullmann shuts her eyes and thinks of Bergman, she sees, she says, “this man who sits in a chair with this smile—a kind of half smile—and very, very lonely, feeling he is a stranger.” She adds, “He is connected to his creativity, but not necessarily to the world.” The isolation that defines Bergman is part of what animates the uncanny atmosphere in his work and activates his unconscious. He claims that there are two ghosts—a judge and a cobbler—who occupy his Fårö outbuildings, and who appear only at night. “I have heard voices,” he says. “Once I saw my mother. I was sitting looking out at the sea. Then suddenly I felt that somebody was standing behind me. I looked, and she was there. Very beautiful and very young.”

For more than half a century now, Bergman has traded in the mysteries with the sure knowledge “that there are a lot of realities in our reality.” He says, “We don’t know anything about those realities. The musicians and the prophets and the saints have given us some messages—have given us intimations of the ineffable.” Bergman can hear it at the end of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. “The chorus is going higher and higher, and suddenly is silent,” he says. “Then you hear four or five bars, and you have a feeling that reality has opened up. Beethoven, who was deaf, had heard something that never had been written before.” Part of Bergman’s gift to his century has been to make visible the mystery he sees around him—to glimpse the eternal in the stage-managed transcendence of play. “Anything can happen, anything is possible and likely,” the Grandmother says to Alexander, reading from Strindberg’s “A Dream Play,” in the last beat of “Fanny and Alexander.” “Against a faint background of reality, imagination spins and weaves new patterns.”

“Ingmar got the life he wanted,” Erland Josephson says. “He is the protagonist of his own life. It’s a drama. He’s creating that drama all the time. Now we have to discuss how to end the drama—some philosophy for leaving the stage.” Josephson continues, “We’ve promised if we get senile to say to each other, ‘No, that’s enough.’ ” For the moment, it’s not. Bergman’s strategy seems close to Edmund Wilson’s stoic dictum: “Keep going; never stoop; sit tight; / Read something luminous at night.”

“I’m my own god, I supply my own angels and demons,” a Bergman character says in “The Rite”; Bergman is also his own clown. A few months ago, he walked into the office of one of the Dramaten’s dramaturges, Ulla Åberg, and pinned on her bulletin board a color photograph of himself with a clown’s red nose. The image is apt. Bergman, like Uncle Carl in “In the Presence of a Clown,” is capering with the absurd: defying death in his art and watching oblivion loom ever closer in his life. But mortality is the one thing Bergman can’t redeem through imagination. “I couldn’t manipulate being born,” he says. “When Ingrid came home and told me she had cancer, I knew the whole time that it was hopeless, but Ingrid didn’t know. That was the second time I saw reality. It was impossible to manipulate that.” Bergman is curious about the third time he’ll come up against that intractable reality. “I’m an old man. I am close to the great mystery,” he says. “I am not afraid of it. I am fascinated, not afraid.”

A few years ago, when Lars Löfgren was still head of the Dramaten, he and Bergman walked past the greenroom, a spacious place full of oil paintings of the theatre’s old luminaries and big pieces of well-upholstered furniture, which give it the cozy feel of a gentlemen’s club. The greenroom door was open, so Bergman walked in. Nobody was there. Löfgren recalls, “ ‘Listen!’ Bergman said. I couldn’t hear a thing. ‘What is it?’ I said. Bergman said, ‘They’re all here.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘The actors,’ Bergman said. ‘They’re not finished with the theatre.’ ” Löfgren continues, “He looked around the room and turned to me and very lovingly said, ‘One day, we will be with them.’ ” ♦

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